Groundwork: Towards a global understanding of at-risk plants

While global assessments of extinction risks for birds, mammals, amphibians and other groups are available to help guide their conservation, no similar baseline has existed for plants, despite the fundamental role they play in the biosphere.

While global assessments of extinction risks for birds, mammals, amphibians and other groups are available to help guide their conservation, no similar baseline has existed for plants, despite the fundamental role they play in the biosphere. The IUCN Sampled Red List Index unveiled here offers the first accurate view of how threatened plants are around the world.

Drawing on specimen collections from the world’s herbaria, including records accessed through GBIF, the authors assessed a 7,000-species sample from five major plant groups to represent the world’s nearly 380,000 described plant species. Reaching the conclusion that more than one in five plants already faces the threat of extinction - a risk that is generally twice as high in the tropics - the authors argue that the world cannot afford this scale of loss, and that we must all work together to conserve what we have.